Non-Theological Exploration

Those who are esteemed umpires of taste, are often persons who have acquired some knowledge of admired pictures or sculptures, and have an inclination for whatever is elegant; but if you inquire whether they are beautiful souls, and whether their own acts are like fair pictures, you learn that they are selfish and sensual. Their cultivation is local, as if you should rub a log of dry wood in one spot to produce fire, all the rest remaining cold. Their knowledge of the fine arts is some study of rules and particulars, or some limited judgment of color or form, which is exercised for amusement or for show. It is proof of the shallowness of the doctrine of beauty, as it lies in the minds of our amateurs, that men seem to have lost the perception of the instant dependence of form upon soul.

There is no doctrine of forms in our philosophy. We were put into our bodies, as fire is put into a pan, to be carried about; but there is no accurate adjustment between spirit and organ, much less is the latter the germination of the former. So in regards to other forms, the intellectual men do not believe in any essential dependence of the material world on thought and volition. Theologians think it a pretty air-castle to talk of the spiritual meaning of a ship or a cloud, of a city or a contract, but they prefer to come again to the solid ground of historical evidence. But the highest minds of the world have never ceased to explore the double meaning, or, shall I say, the quadruple, or, the centuple, or much more manifold meaning of every sensuous fact.

Ralph Waldo Emerson in his 1844 essay, The Poet is explaining an interesting belief we have about the separation that exists within the self or the nucleus of the self. We believe in fragments and act out those fragments in order to experience them physically. Consciousness is unpredictable and within every action there is a conglomerate of energy units that surface as needed in order to express the essence within all consciousness. That essence is expressed in the energy of awareness and experienced by all aspects of the consciousness or the soul (in religious terms) of each fragment.

Hence different selves choose unpredictable probabilities differently so the consciousness within can experience every aspect of itself and sense the artistic creativity of being a whole fragment of another whole. The world of the self is more than historical facts that produce an erasable path of meaning. It is a world of vibrational harmony that resonates with the desires of each unit flowing through individual consciousness.

Art in present time is not material creations alone; it is the unpredictable energy that manifests from those energy units which then become another experience of consciousness. We choose a separate shell of being in order to sense the inner beauty of self that sends truth through vibrational impulses where all aspects of consciousness merge into a flowing stream of non-theological exploration.